comments Written By: Scott Jangro
July 3, 2006

This is Your Website…

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This is your website using CJ’s LMI Javascript links…


 

This is your website using CJ’s LMI Javascript links with Javascript disabled…


 

Any questions?

The webmaster of StyleForFree has been experimenting with Javascript links and has been sharing her experience here on ABW.

She points out some of the great things about Javascript links — specifically she can set it and let the merchant update the text. No more updates for her. Easy on her sore wrists. All true and great features. Unless your visitors don’t have Javascript enabled. Not exactly how you want your website to be seen.

The second screenshot is exactly what search-engine spiders see as well.

Also, I intentionally took that first shot while hovering over a link. Look at the status bar:
run script “CJ10400469X247.submit()”
I can’t be the only one that glances down at the status bar before clicking anything. I’d think twice before clicking that.

This exemplifies the point. Javsacript links are great for sidebar and banner ads. Stuff that your website can do without. But to serve the main content in Javascript, especially without backing it up with alternative content hidden behind noscript tags or javascript support detection is just bad web publishing practice.

I cannot imagine any SEO or web usability expert would recommend putting actual web-page content inside Javascript links.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    Forex traders
    online forex trading
    [URL=http://ldd.co.uk/online-forex.html]online forex trading[/URL] here
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    This is my website.

    This is my website now going thru Javascript (JS) Detox.

    We just returned from a biz trip in NYC and I can't tell you how many complaints we received from our subscribers that anytime they tried to access a page of ours which had one of these nasty links embedeed, how mad they were when the page was blanked and/or completely whited out.

    In retail, the customer is ALWAYS #1. And that was enough for me to decide to remove each and every JS based link from our site. Our traffic suffered dramatically during this experimentation too. Oh...and a customer told me they ordered from those Circuit City JS links and guess what...I haven't seen one darn sale from any of the experiment links we were using either. A definite no-win, no-win.

    If CJ's reading: If it isn't broke...don't fix it. What's been working for over 6 years should remain. Let's work on growth. There are way better directions Internet shopping is moving and I'm so proud of you for being the first to start opening the global affiliate gateway. Let's work on that together. Can the JS links. They're not useful!

    If merchants are reading: If you decide, even after the holidays, to run your affiliate program based purely on JS links, we'll unfortunately have no other choice than to discontinue our partnership with you. And that would make us very sad.

    Thanks so much for the powerful visual Scott! A picture's worth a 1000 words. Waving from 25 miles away :)

    Liz
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    It seems to me that a banner with redirect code gives the merchant sufficient control over an ad. They can change any thing said in the image of the banner and the destination of an ad. The only thing they really can't change is the ALT Tag (in CJ parlance the "Null" tag).

    Many merchants such as Overstock are successfully using promotion code banners that they control.

    There are benefits that can be had with Javascript. The SmartZone code is a better example of what you can do with JS. The affiliate can use a smartzone to rotate banners, or can use the CJ interface to swap out banners.

    There are probably some extremely cool things that could be done that let merchants and affiliates program pages with JS ... however such efforts would start by publishing an interface for controlling JS scripts and not an LMI mandate.
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    An excellent post. Affiliates running their websites dynamically are scratching their heads wonder now how to store this new link format in the database. Is it really worth the effort?
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    Ouch. Knowing something and then actually seeing it in action has an impact often times. Those links can't be integrated into her RSS feed and most likely forum either.
 

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